personal website of James Turk, a developer in Washington, DC
Disclaimer: It cannot be stressed enough -- ZEngine and photon are completely unsupported, it was written by me in my early teen years mostly as a reason to learn the associated technologies, learning is perhaps the only use of the code (as it is fairly well documented) but I hesitate to even recommend that.
There is a good chance you've been redirected here trying to find the page for either of the projects so let it be said that I would strongly recommend against it. Also please understand it has been so long since I've even looked at the source I am unable to answer even simple questions about building or using either project.
And now a brief history lesson..
From 2002-2004 I worked on a 2D game engine called ZEngine, it was a 2D game library that used SDL and later added hardware accelerated drawing via OpenGL. Apparently people still download it from Sourceforge in somewhat moderate numbers -- I'm still contacted by users who have informed me they use it to learn SDL.
The last official release of ZEngine was 0.8.5, followed several months later with a 'source freeze' release that contained many of the features that became photon.
In 2004-2005 ZEngine underwent a complete rewrite at which point it became photon and dropped it's SDL dependency.
photon never had an official 0.1.0 release, although the 0.0.2 release contained all the features of ZEngine 0.8.5 and some (photon 0.1 would have been akin to ZEngine 0.9)
By this point I had entered college, my interest in game development had waned, also I very badly wanted to rewrite the whole thing in Python (or as a Python extension). If I had ever done so I like to think the results would have looked something like pyglet. (which I do recommend)
James Turk is a 23 year old currently living in Washington, DC working for Sunlight Labs. This site is a place for my projects and thoughts.
content © James Turk — cc-by unless otherwise noted